Like several of the songs on Every Acre, “Shadows” is a result of a steady and balanced assembling of instincts between me and Luke. We slowly and remotely wove together loose threads until we had something that resembled squares of cloth, eventually collecting enough of them to start stitching a quilt. He would send me instrumental voice memo recordings of chord progressions or guitar riffs—giving them funny titles we could remember, like “Boy Orbison” and “Swamp Creature”—and I would take those and start building a world around them, adding vocal melodies and establishing some structure and eventually lyrics. “Shadows” was the first of these collaborations, and it’s a great example of how Luke and I worked together on this album. I remember feeling so inspired by this pivot in our creative process: laying my guitar down for a while and responding to his unique style of fingerpicking, tones, and tempos. I reached and stretched in different and new ways, negotiating my vocal deliveries and melodic positioning with the spaces and shapes of his guitar lines.
In the choruses, I speak to myself about a particularly distinct depression and isolation I experienced during an early pandemic-inspired quarantine. Casey’s decision to try bowed parts on the stand-up bass added a fitting sustain and disdain. S.G. Goodman delivered appropriately moody harmonies and a top-notch call-and-response exchange in the bridge that mimicked the isolation-induced circular thought patterns echoing around in my head. And Daniel’s pulsating drum beat anchored us all—throbbing and resolute, but also alive and capable of unhinging everything it is holding up.
—H.C. McEntire, Jan 27, 2023